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Marketplace plays key role in leisure, even for children, scholar says

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

7/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — ADVERTISING
Marketplace plays key role in leisure, even for children, scholar says
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — If asked to name potential threats to their children, U.S. parents might say child pornography, drugs, gun-wielding sociopaths, television, movies, songs and the Internet. Collecting toys or trading cards probably wouldn’t be on the list.

And yet, seemingly innocuous pastimes such as these did surface not long ago as major threats to the innocence of late 20th century childhood.

As reported by U.S. and Canadian media beginning in 1995, collecting Beanie Babies and trading sports and Pokemon cards triggered a veritable epidemic of unseemly behavior in children and their parents – theft, cheating and other forms of subterfuge and deception. Acts of violence, arrests and lawsuits also erupted as children and adults became increasingly obsessed with the monetary value of these cards and stuffed toys that ostensibly were part of the childhood world. The media frenzy fed the speculation frenzy, setting off what Daniel Cook, a child leisure/consumer specialist, calls "moral panics" among people who feared that the "sacred values" of childhood were being eroded.

In the April-June issue of Leisure Sciences, Cook examines the heated public debates that surrounded the fad of collecting sports "chase" cards (scarce prime cards), Beanie Babies and Pokemon cards. The common thread uniting these products is the deliberate production of scarcity on the part of the manufacturers, either through "retiring" a toy or randomly inserting rare cards in select packs, effectively creating a secondary market of trading fueled by speculation.

After analyzing 350 media stories, Cook, a professor of advertising at the University of Illinois, determined that the media debates reflected both a "cultural contradiction about childhood" and a "deep ambivalence about the free market and capitalism."

"Parents want their children to learn real-world lessons, but then find that the real world teaches things that even they find offensive, if examined closely enough," Cook said, referring to the reports of gambling addiction, chicanery and greed among children and their parents. "Trickery is part of capitalism," he continued. "It is not the seedy underbelly, but the way things work on a daily basis, especially when it comes to the raw pursuit of profit, as in the stock market and some entrepreneurial aspects of our economic system."

Leisure – even the leisure of children, Cook said, can no longer be seen as "a respite from everyday life." For better or for worse, "It is entangled with the market and all that goes with it." Cook recommends that parents intervene in their children’s consumer lives – not only with censorship when appropriate, but also with information – imparting lessons about "the motivated, persuasive intent behind most product appeals."
Children could come of age "understanding the nature of advertising and able to read the subtext underlying all such appeals," Cook said, adding that it also would be nice "if parents made media criticism as much a part of the home routine as doing the laundry."